The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to implementations of the claimed inventions.
Cloud computing infrastructures include servers with a mix of input/output (I/O) and compute intensive workloads. These servers are typically based on 64-bit processors and operating systems with a large physical address space. The servers may have many gigabytes (GB s) of random access memory (RAM). Linux® kernel memory management and other operating systems have inherent issues with these server and workload mixes.
For example, large swaths of free memory are taken up by page caches for intensive block I/O operations. Cache memory is not freed up by default and continues to accumulate cached pages until the server runs out of memory. Unavailable free pages may cause the server to use swap space that can degrade server performance. Under high memory pressure conditions, the operating system kernel may evict least used code pages that may be critical for a user application, which will likely result in further reducing server performance.